4/30/2009 @ 6:00PM

The Force Is Strong In This One

BURLINGAME, CALIF. — A few decades ago, in a toy store not far, far from L.A., Stephen Sansweet laid hands on his first Star Wars action figure. “I always liked space stuff, and I had collected Japanese toy robots,” he recalls. “These attracted me from the start.”

“Attracted” is one way to put it. Today, Sansweet owns what is almost certainly the world’s largest collection of Star Wars memorabilia, with some 57,000 catalogued objects and a total number of goods he estimates at about 100,000.

Posters and clothing, dolls and action figures, statues, food, games and puzzles–even Sansweet’s collection doesn’t cover all the goods that manufacturers and fans around the world have cranked out in homage to George Lucas’ epic space fantasy. Total worldwide Star Wars memorabilia sales, starting from the first movie programs and T-shirts issued in 1977, are estimated to exceed $15 billion. There’s even an annual “Star Wars Day” in May (“May the fourth be with you”).

A collection like Sansweet’s testifies not just to the power of storytelling and global commerce, however. It speaks of a man happily obsessed. Sansweet, who describes himself as “somewhat obsessive,” amassed things like matchbooks and swizzle sticks even before he felt “The Force.”

He was a newspaper reporter when he paid $1.97 for each of those first 12 figures. He kept going, to a point where some years later he built an addition onto his house to hold the hoard.

“OK, it is where most of my income has gone,” he says without a trace of regret. The urge to collect, whether Old Master Paintings, rare books or Jar Jar Binks lollipops, is, he says, “part of the primal instinct for the hunt.” It also takes him to a lot of stores and conventions where people share his passion for the tale.

Such devotion did not go unnoticed. Sansweet left The Wall Street Journal in 1996 for Lucasfilm, where he is in charge of fan relations. That keeps him in touch with even more material and stokes his admiration of fellow fans’ creativity. “The strength of Lucasfilm is the fans, and the freedom they get to hold their own conventions, make uniforms, write films and make drawings–as long as it isn’t unlicensed commercial use.”

His collection, which keeps growing, is now stashed in “Rancho Obi-Wan,” a converted 5,000-square-foot barn in a county north of San Francisco. Closed to the public, Sansweet occasionally opens it for charity tours.

“The Smithsonian has said they would be happy to accept my collection ‘when I am done with it,’” says Sansweet. “They never used the words ‘buy’ or ‘die,’ though–thanks for that.”

Sansweet has also published a dozen Star Wars books, most recently a three-volume encyclopedia whose 1.2 million words, hardbound, weigh in at 11 pounds. His 13th effort is about his own collection. Entitled “Star Wars 1000 Collectibles: Memorabilia and Stories from a Galaxy Far, Far Away” it comes out this October.

For all the money spent (and probably sitting inside the barn–just one rare action figure from that first collection is now worth $2,000) Sansweet figures the real value is the memories. “For real fans, it’s about what it means to you, how you felt when you got it,” he says.